Abstract
Gorani refers alternately to a subgroup of the Iranian languages spoken in the borderlands between Iraq and Iran with small islands of speakers stippling the map from the Iranian border to Nineveh or to a literary standard used widely until the decline of the Ardalan dynasty in the 19th century. Here, we explore both these uses of the term to understand the place of Gorani varieties among the regional languages. The role of Gorani has, at times, been the local idiom of minoritized groups or a prestigious literary standard. Gorani and its speakers have substantially impacted its neighbors, including Neo-Aramaic, Southern and Central Kurdish, and Laki. It has been the chosen literary language and spoken vernacular of various religious groups. The conservative character of Gorani varieties has made it essential to understand Iranian dialectology. Here, we explore all aspects of Gorani, explicitly focusing on its diachronic and sociolinguistic developments and the history of its study.
Published in Gorani in its historical and linguistic context
About:
Gorani refers to under-documented, endangered varieties spoken in a cluster within the Zagros mountains (Iran/Iraq). These varieties possess conservative features of importance to linguists. However, their study has been plagued by nomenclature and taxonomy issues. Traditional names for these languages have been supplanted first by orientalists‘ prescriptions and then by their linguist heirs. Inaccurate terminology has sewn discord between speaker communities, disturbing the sociolinguistic landscape. This volume represents the state of the art of Gorani’s historical and socio-linguistics, documentation, and literature, as well as an effort to aid the „decolonization“ of Gorani linguistics.
Contents:
- Shuan Osman Karim & Saloumeh Gholami: Gorani in its historical and linguistic context
- Saeed Karami & Saloumeh Gholami: Examining the structural differences and similarities between literary Gorani and Hawrami through the lens of diglossiaby
- Parvin Mahmoudveysi: The Gūrānī variety of Bzɫāna and the literary language of Saydī
- Hamidreza Nikravesh: Judeo-Gūrānī: Tracing the emergence of a literary corpus
- Geoffrey Khan & Masoud Mohammadirad. Gorani influence on NENA
- Shuan Osman Karim: Pattern borrowing/convergence in the Southern Kurdish Zone
- Mohammad Rasekh-Mahand: The Laki of the Ahl-e Haqq community in Češin: Some morphosyntactic features
- Mahîr Dogan: Problems in Zazakî nomenclature
The aim of this paper is to look at some of the problems with the traditional subdivisions of Iranian and at possible new approaches. It builds on an argument made in Korn (2016a), adding discussion and further illustrating problems in the data and methods involved in the traditional model of relations among the Iranian languages. It specifically points out that the traditional family tree is based on a set of isoglosses that is an artefact of the data that happened to be available at the time. In addition, the question arises whether the wave model or the concept of linguistic areas would be more adequate to account for the data. The discovery of a corpus of Bactrian manuscripts encourages a new approach. I argue that a sub-branch including Bactrian, Parthian and some other languages is a hypothesis that deserves to be tested; at the same time, the comparison with other Iranian languages as well as typological considerations permit to assess the role of language contact.
Bynon (1980: 160) states: “Given the loss of ergative agreement marking in the verb, the clitic must, it would seem, now definitely be analyzed as a marker of agreement with the agent-subject despite its anomalous position in the sentence”, and concludes that “in spite of its various no longer functional traces of ergativity, Suleimaniye must be considered to have ceased to be ergative.” However, ergativity is still claimed for Sorani Kurdish.2 Recently Haig rejected Bynon analysis and stated (2008: 302) “The O is only occasionally overtly cross-referenced […]. However, when it is crossreferenced, then exclusively on the verb, and using the same set of suffixes that cross-reference an S.”* In this article I argue in favour of Bynon (1979, 1980) and show that there is no agreement of the object and the verb. The personal endings used in the past tense of transitive verbs take over the various functions of enclitic pronouns. On the other hand, enclitic pronouns used in the past tense of transitive verbs are, in fact, subject agreement markers, personal endings, so to speak. After a short introduction to ergativity and relevant terminology (Section 1), I will give a brief survey of the historical development of the ergative construction in Iranian (Sections 2 and 3). A comparison of Middle Persian and Sorani Kurdish (Section 4) is made to understand the differences between the past tense constructions of these two languages which look so similar at first glance. In Section 5, I propose an explanation of the development in Sorani Kurdish and then discuss the function of personal markers, which are in my view not as complicated as Haig (2008: 295) puts it (Section 6).
Historical linguistic sources of Kurdish date back just a few hundred years, thus it is not possible to track the profound grammatical changes of Western Iranian languages in Kurdish. Through a comparison with attested languages of the Middle Iranian period, this paper provides a hypothetical chronology of grammatical changes. It allows us to tentatively localise the approximate time when modern varieties separated with regard to the respective grammatical change. In order to represent the types of linguistic relationship involved, distinct models of language contact and language continua are set up.
There are about eight million speakers of Central Kurdish (Sorani) in Iran and Iraq. Unlike Iran, in Iraq the language enjoys an official status at both regional (Kurdistan Regional Government) and federal levels. This chapter presents a chronological history of the emergence, development and standardization of written Central Kurdish in Kurdistan (Iran and Iraq) and diasporas. It underlines language planning achievements to date and the challenges the language faces in terms of corpus planning, status and recognition and acquisition planning (its teaching and learning). Debates over what this variety should be called and a detailed breakdown of the population of its speakers are presented.
This chapter tackles several interrelated issues around the Kurdish language. It provides a general internal classification of Kurdish varieties, proposing also a theoretically informed distinction between language history and collective identity perceptions of speakers to resolve the classification disputes around Zazaki and Gorani varieties. ‘Kurdish’ in this sense is considered more a sociolinguistic unit than a purely linguistic entity. The chapter then provides summary discussion of the position of Iranian philology on the history of Kurdish, whereby it is shown that Kurdish is not in a direct descendant relationship with any of the known languages of the Old and Middle Iranian periods. The chapter traces the history of written and literary Kurmanji Kurdish. The rise of literary or written code in Kurmanji is shown to have taken place in late sixteenth century within the wider sociopolitical context of, on one hand, the emergence of powerful Kurdish principalities and widespread madrasa education, and, on the other hand, a general trend in the vernacularization of local community languages in Kurdistan. Finally, the development of modern Kurmanji as a polycentric variety is discussed and the current approximation of written norms are projected to merge in a more comprehensive plurinormative Kurmanji standard.